NOTE I MEDICAL RECORD OF QUEEN ELIZABETH I A. FAMILY HISTORY OF ELIZABETH N January, 1510, Catherine of Aragon, who had married Henry VIII. in the preceding year, gave birth to a stillborn child. A year later she had a son, who died the following month. A year and a half afterward there was another son stillborn, or dying immediately. Less than a year after that, in November, 1514, there was another son, who died as soon as christened. Mary, who later became queen, was born in 1516; there was certainly one miscarriage in 1517, and Prof. Pollard says at p. 177 of his life of Henry VIII., "it is probable that about this time the Queen had various miscarriages." In 1518 there was a stillborn daughter. Henry took Anne Boleyn for his next wife, and about nine months afterward Elizabeth was born. In 1534, in the second year of their married life, Anne had a miscarriage, and in the beginning of 1536 she gave birth to a stillborn infant. Her immediate successor, Jane Seymour, died the following year in giving birth to King Edward, the last of Henry's progeny. In 1519 Henry had the illegitimate Duke of Richmond by one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting. He died when seventeen, having apparently been in poor health, gradually failing for some time. Edward's health broke down at fifteen, and then, according to the Brit. Med. Jour., 1910, vol. i. p. 1303, under the title "Some Royal Death-Beds,"" eruptions on his skin came out; his hair fell off, and then his nails, and afterwards the joints of his toes and fingers." Then he died, three months before he reached sixteen. When Mary arrived at sixteen, she broke down with a prolonged illness, and never had good health thereafter. Her colour was invariably sallow, and for many years she was never free from headache and palpitation of the heart. (Venetian Cal. 1553-4, 532.) "Some personal infirmities under which she labours are the causes to her of both public and private affliction; to remedy these recourse is had to frequent blood-letting, and this is the real cause of her paleness and the general weakness of her frame."-Rept. Ven. Ambass. in 1557, Ellis, 2 Ser. II. 236. The above-quoted article in the B.M.J. says this of Mary: . her strength was further reduced by frequent bleedings ordered by her physicians. She had long suffered from a disease which she called her old guest.' The chief symptom was amenorrhoea. Spencer Wells, in an address delivered before the Brit. Med. Assn. at Manchester in 1877, expressed the opinion that the disease was ovarian dropsy. Wells believed that she aborted early in her first and only real pregnancy. The disappointment no doubt weighed heavily on her mind. She became cachectic, and a subsequent enlargement of the abdomen gave rise to false hopes. For years before the end her health had been bad. As a girl she had suffered from scanty and painful menstruation, the result, it may be conjectured, of overstudy. In more advanced life, she was seldom free from headaches and palpitation of the heart, and her bodily ailments were doubtless aggravated by mental suffering." She was a great sufferer from melancholy, and was so short-sighted that she could not read or study anything clearly without placing her eyes quite close to the object. "Henry VIII. suffered many years before his death from a sorre legge,' .”—Annals of the Barber Surg. "In 1546 the life of Henry VIII. was coming to an end. From a handsome, athletic man he had become a mass of loathsome infirmities. He was bloated in face, and so unwieldy in body that he could not pass through an ordinary door, and could be moved from one room to another only by help of machinery, and a number of attendants. His legs were swollen and ulcerated, the festering sores causing an unbearable stench. Towards the end he could neither walk nor stand." Above article in B.M.J. "Deaths due primarily to syphlis. Henry VIII. Edward VI." Deaths of the Kings of England, p. 6, by James Rae, M.A., M.D. NOTE 2 THE EARLIEST WRITING OF ELIZABETH The search for the first writing of Elizabeth became exciting when we read in the second edition of Miss Strickland's Life of Elizabeth (Colburn, 1851) at p. 17, note 2: "Her (Elizabeth's) Italian exercise-book, written on fine vellum, is shown at the British Museum. Some of the tenses of the verbs, which she perhaps wrote from memory, are incorrect, and are left so, having escaped the examination of her Italian master." Long before this came to our attention we had supposed that we had seen all the early specimens of Elizabeth's hand, no one of which appeared to conform to Miss Strickland's detailed description. At any rate, the search was most exhaustive, and it can be affirmed that there is not now and never has been any such book—that is, at the B.M. The remaining difficulty is to explain how so painstaking an author as Miss Strickland could have fallen into such an error. Miss Strickland first published in 1842. At p. 18 of that edition is the following: "Among the royal manuscripts in the British Museum is a small volume, in an embroidered binding, consisting of prayers and meditations, selected from different English writers by Queen Katharine Parr, and translated and copied by the Princess Elizabeth, in Latin, French, and Italian. The volume is dedicated to Queen Katharine, and her initials, R.K.P., are introduced in the binding, between those of the Saviour, wrought in blue silk and silver thread by the hand of Elizabeth. The volume is dated Hertford, December 20, 1545." But there is no mention of any exercise-book. Upon taking up the third edition, 1864, we find no mention at all of the prayer-book, while there is this shorter mention of the exercise-book: "Her Italian exercisebook, written on fine vellum, is shown at the British Museum." Note 2, p. 12. In the abbreviated edition of 1867, the last in the life of the author, there is mentioned neither prayer-book nor exercisebook. Some quarter of a century after Miss Strickland had passed away, however, came the Everyman edition of her Elizabeth, which reverts to her first edition, describing the prayer-book, but omitting any reference to the exercise-book. Under these circumstances the conclusion was forced that Miss Strickland had confused the prayer-book, part of which is in Italian, and a supposed Italian exercise-book which strictly speaking had no existence. Yet so elaborate an error is altogether unexampled in the work of Miss Strickland, and the same may be said of that of her sister Elizabeth, whose volumes were published in Agnes's name. Before leaving them, I wish to say that, considered from the point of view of research, reliability and range of their work, the Misses Strickland are in the first rank of English historians. Had they been men, they would have ranked with Gibbon for the solidity and indestructibility of their writings; in the estimation, that is to say, of the general public. Had they had the literary style of Froude or Macaulay and been born men, the sisters would have been acclaimed by all. The only possible explanation with regard to the exercise-book might be disclosed could we secure the MSS. of Miss Strickland's work; but here again we are baffled, for they are not to be found. They appear to have passed to Messrs. Macmillan many years ago, through Messrs. Bentley & Son when the latter business was taken over, and Messrs. Macmillan now write that they have lost all trace of the originals. There are several theories upon which to explain the rather astonishing fact that despite the continuous presence of The Mirror of the Sinful Soul at the Bodleian since 1729, we are the first historian who appears ever to have seen it: one being that the British Museum and not the Bodleian was the chief working place of the writers involved. But the chief reason for the neglect of this volume, the most important, because it is by a full year the earliest and therefore the most pregnant with significance, of all the tangible evidences of the little girl's development, undoubtedly lies in the fact that Hearne in 1716 published in his book Sylloge Epistolarum (the first collection of English State Letters)-in the form of an ordinary letter with nothing to distinguish it as being otherwise—the dedication of the book to Katherine Parr; and as this dedication recited that Elizabeth sent therewith her translation of the "lytell boke . . . intytled or named ye miroir or glasse of the synnefull soule," and there was nothing in print to indicate the existence of the book itself, the dedication has always passed as an early letter of Elizabeth that accompanied a book sent by her to the Queen which had disappeared, whereas the dedication was an integral part of the volume itself. This oversight, taken with the undisputed view that Hearne was of the very highest authority and accuracy, would of itself, indeed, probably have continued to deflect writers from the truth. Miss Strickland, for example, confines her detailed description of the early literary efforts of Elizabeth to the book of prayers-referred to in the preceding note-at the British Museum, and dismisses the earlier work at the Bodleian by a mere "The dedication by this princess of her elegant translation from the Italian (!) of the devotional treatise The Glasse of Synnefull Soule, to Queen Katharine, was doubtless an offering of gratitude no less than respect from Elizabeth to her royal step-mother." (1851 ed. p. 17.) Wiesener, at p. 19, vol. i., note, of his The Youth of Queen Elizabeth, refers to J. Stevenson's Cal. State Pap., 1558-9, as his sole authority for the fact that Elizabeth at one time wrote the earlier translation, and we find Mr. Stevenson for his sole authority refers to Hearne. Mumby, in The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth, at p. 24, follow Hearne's example, and merely prints the dedication in the guise of a separate letter, referring for his authority only to Miss Wood's Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies-and the latter refers as her solitary source to p. 51 of a MS. in the Bodleian; so that it is evident that neither Miss Strickland-the only general biographer of Elizabeth who has ever mentioned that there had been such a book-nor Wiesener nor Mumby, two special biographers, nor Miss Wood, knew that such a book could now be seen; and no general historian has made even the remotest reference to the translation. But besides this carelessness of Hearne, there is another accident in the history of this MS. that is extraordinary, and one that undoubtedly has had much to do with the obscurity in which it has been wrapped for over three hundred and fifty years. The occurrence is brought sharply forward by this sentence from Miss Strickland, 1851 ed. p. 17: "Camden mentions A Godly Meditation of the Soule, concerning Love towardes Christe our Lorde; translated by Elizabeth from the French." We are entirely unable to discover any such reference in Camden, but that is relatively unimportant when we say that the work thus mentioned by Miss Strickland is the published, printed volume from the Bodleian MS. whose proper title is, not "A Godly Medytacyon of the christen Soule," but the title written in the original MS. in the hand of Elizabeth, "Ye Miroir of the Synnefull Soule." (Cf. first edition of original French work, published at Alençon, 1531, where the title is Le miroir de lame pecheresse.) The entirely unauthorized title of the published translation appears to have misled Miss Strickland and everybody else; and curiously enough, the latest and most important victim of this error is the last authority of whom it should be expected ; we refer to Mr. H. H. E. Craster, Bodley's assistant librarian. In The English Historical Review for October, 1914, we find at pp. 722-3 a bibliography of Queen Elizabeth's translations by Mr. Craster, in which the error is persisted in, the Miroir being given as No. I of the list of "Published Translations of which the Originals are extant," while the Medytacyon, as No. 5, "translated from the French by the Princess Elizabeth in 1547" heads the list of "Published Translations of which the originals have not been traced "; and a letter from Mr. Craster in 1916 shows that he had not become aware of his error until we called it to his attention. His placing the translation in 1547 is of course three years too late. The Miroir, then, all in Elizabeth's hand, is not only of great value as the first known specimen of her handwriting-with only the possible exception of the Italian half-sheet letter of 31st July, 1544-but its 128 pages are the complete MS. of the only book she wrote that has ever appeared in print. This appeared in volume form when Elizabeth was fifteen, being printed probably in 1548, at Marburg. That there are verbal differences between the MS. U |